Courtney Love's official Twitter account, @courtney, is almost as infamous as the rocker herself. Last year, after calling fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir a "prostitute," "drug-dealer," and "thief" via the microsharing site, Love agreed to pay Simorangkir $430,000 in the first ever Twitter defamation settlement. Since then, she's maintained a relatively peaceful Internet presence, with last week's "wheres that fucking groundhog.." being the nastiest she's gotten in a while. But, lest you think Love was getting all zen on us, it turns out she just had a password-protected outlet for her angst: a private Twitter account called @cbabymichelle, which only has 524 approved followers. In his new ebook, Courtney Comes Clean: The High Life and Dark Depths of Music's Most Controversial Icon, former Radar magazine editor Maer Roshan divulged that @courtney is written by the star's assistant and that @cbabymichelle is where she really lets loose. He explains that, although Love publicly quit Twitter after the Simorangkir debacle, "total abstinence was apparently too much to bear for the singer, who went on to maintain two separate Twitter accounts, which her pals dubbed ‘Good Sister' and ‘Bad Sister', after the title of one of her songs."

Last September, Love took back her old @courtney handle and, according to Roshan, ordered a staffer to keep it PR-friendly while she continued to tweet covertly from her more private account, "where she lashed out at a wide range of enemies, from Chelsea Handler to musician Dave Grohl. 'So Edward Norton gets to be ambassador to Malawi?' cbabymichelle railed about her former boyfriend last August. 'That's funny, he doesn't even like Madonna.' All the while, @courtney "was issuing a daily series of saccharine tweets, begging @kellyosbourne for forgiveness for Love's attacks on her, heaping praise on casino mogul @ElaineWynn and slathering @perezhilton with "xxoxoxxos" despite his trashing of her over the years."

Advertisement

But Good Courtney couldn't save Bad Courtney from herself: last October, Love got pissed at @courtney's "cloying tweets" and attacked her alter-ego from the safety of @cbabymichelle. Writes Roshan:

"Look, good Courtney, I know we have to be behaving cause were up for movie roles and people are watching," raged Love, threatening to replace her alter-ego. "I'll have you removed at once from doing the celeb-friendly/corporate act if you don't get your shit together and stop making me look like a fool!" A day later, Bad Courtney's inflammatory tweets disappeared.

Judging from the screen cap The Fix gave The Observer, the "real" Love is still tweeting from @cbabymichelle. Just last week, she tweeted to social media researcher Dana Boyd: "i have a 'friend' whose doing my @courtney twitter do to my rantiness=etc- this is actually me - he clearly cant brandHELP." Courtney Love: The Jekyll/Hyde of our times.